Advanced Targeting

Last Modified September 26, 2018|
Originally Posted May 23, 2014

With our advanced targeting feature, you can create highly specific rules for targeting offers to your preferred audiences. In HasOffers, you’ll find common targeting rules, such as browser type, device brand, and operating system. Additionally, you have the option to define and manage your own targeting rules.

Enterprise accounts can also include the device name, language, and user agent variables. Professional accounts have access only to browser-specific offer targeting.

Important: An offer must first be assigned to an offer group before it can use advanced targeting rules.

Enabling Advanced Targeting

To enable advanced targeting for an offer, go to the offer’s page and find the Targeting panel. Click Edit at the top of the panel. On the page that appears, set Advanced Targeting to “Show the offer to targeted devices”:

Adding & Removing Targeting Rules

Once advanced targeting is enabled, you can add or manage targeting rules for the offer. Targeting rules determine which users can see the offer. For example, you can add a targeting rule to only show the offer to users with Apple brand devices.

To add a new targeting rule, click the Add a New Rule button. In the window that appears, select an option from each dropdown menu, then click Add Rule once you’re finished. Each offer may have up to 10 advanced targeting rules.

To remove a targeting rule, click the Remove button next to the rule you want to remove.

Targeting Logic

For offers using advanced targeting rules, a user only sees the offer if they:

match at least one “Allow” rule

do not match any “Deny” rules

If the user fails to match advanced targeting rules for the offer, HasOffers redirects the user to another offer in the offer group. If the user then fails to match targeting rules for all other offers in the offer group (geotargeting included), then the user is sent to the original offer URL.

Note: This functionality is different from when a user fails to match geotargeting rules for the original offer and all other offers in its group. In that case, the user is served a blank page.

When setting up advanced targeting rules, focus on using “Allow” rules. We suggest using “Deny” rules only for exceptions to “Allow” rules.

As an example, if your offer only has an “Allow” rule for Apple devices, a “Deny” rule for Samsung devices is not needed because they are already excluded. However, you could use a “Deny” rule to exclude a subset of Apple device users, like iPhone users.

Match All Rule

If you only want to deny access in a small number of cases, then you can use the “Match All” rule. When you only have “Deny” rules added to an offer, a green Add the Match All rule button will appear:

To add the “Match All” rule, click the button.

Creating Custom Rules

HasOffers provides you with a number of predefined rules, but you can also create your own as custom rules. Custom rules follow the same targeting logic as predefined rules, and can include other variables such as affiliate sub IDs, OS or browser versions, and user agents.

To create a custom rule, click the Manage Rule Logic button from the main offer targeting page. Then, click Create A New Rule and enter a name for your custom rule. Once you’re finished, click Create Rule.

On the Manage Rules page that appears, you can edit the rule name, add the variables you want to match with values, and make notes on the custom rule itself. Once a rule is created, you can also see each offer that uses the rule for targeting in the Usage section.

Adding Logic to Your Custom Rule

For each of your custom rules, you can specify values to match one or more of the available variables.

To do so, first select a variable from the Add Variable dropdown menu. Then, type your desired value for that variable into the corresponding Value field. For example, you can add logic to your custom rule that matches the variable aff_sub1 to a value of “example123”:

Regular Expressions

A regular expression is a string that represents a search pattern. If you’re familiar with regular expressions, you can use them as inputs for the Value field when editing a custom rule.

For example, you can use regular expressions to match specifically for Internet Explorer 8 using the browser name and browser version variables:

If you’re unfamiliar with regular expressions, there are plenty of external resources to learn more! For example, you can read about how they work and test or debug regular expressions that you create.

For information on the user agent string values that your regular expressions are evaluated against, you can explore the WURFL database.